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GOOGLE, the world鈥檚 number one search engine, has lost its edge. That鈥檚 the considered view of software engineers who have been testing an early version of Microsoft鈥檚 MSN Search service, released last week.

The quality of search offered by the Microsoft product will soon easily match that of Google, the experts say. And Yahoo鈥檚 search engine already does, they add. Google is only top of the heap because of the 鈥渕indshare鈥� it has garnered since it exploded onto the scene in 1998.

鈥淚t鈥檚 now more a perception issue that Google is the best,鈥� says Chris Sherman of the SearchEngineWatch website in Darien, Connecticut. 鈥淔or some things, Yahoo is already much better.鈥� His colleague Danny Sullivan adds: 鈥淕oogle鈥檚 secret weapon was advanced link analysis. But now everyone, including Microsoft, is doing link analysis, and the quality of search has gone up across the board.鈥�

Google shot to glory because it had a killer technology that could find the most relevant search hits in a heartbeat. 鈥淕oogle came out with a better search technology when everyone was else was ignoring it,鈥� says Jim Friedland, an analyst at investment bank SG Cowen in San Francisco. At the time, the dotcoms were obsessed with developing portals; only Google realised how lucrative spot-on searching could be.

Its secret weapon, an algorithm called PageRank, was patented by Larry Page, one of its co-founders. PageRank determines a web page鈥檚 importance by the number of sites that link to it, and then weights those links according to a number of other factors. It has been so successful that the verb 鈥渢o google鈥� has entered the vernacular. Google made money by displaying ads relevant to the search, with the advertiser paying for each click-through.

Google鈥檚 Achilles鈥� heel is the fact that while the PageRank algorithm is proprietary, the link analysis underlying it is a general method for studying connectivity in networks, and so cannot be patented. This is allowing other search engines such as Yahoo and AskJeeves to use link analysis alongside their own weighting data. 鈥淓veryone is now using link information and the ideas behind PageRank,鈥� says Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not the same algorithm but it鈥檚 the same idea.鈥�

Last week, Microsoft joined the fray with its own search engine based on link analysis (). Although the site had a few start-up glitches, observers immediately saw a leap in the quality of Microsoft鈥檚 search hits. 鈥淭he differences between the search engines are now so slight, it鈥檚 going to be hard for any company to differentiate on technical grounds,鈥� Sherman says.

Bill Gates鈥檚 engineers are trying other tricks, too. Like AskJeeves, MSN Search attempts to parse and answer natural-language questions such as: 鈥淲hat is the capital of Turkey?鈥�. Users can go to a preference panel to tune their search by adjusting the weight given to the popularity, importance and update frequency of websites. They can also localise a search because MSN can figure out a computer鈥檚 location from its internet protocol address. Google users have to type their location.

As for Google, it is continuing to try and grab as much of the PC action as possible with offerings like its Google toolbar, Gmail service and recently launched Desktop Search system. What is likely to keep Google at the top for the foreseeable future is its prominent position in most people鈥檚 minds. 鈥淕oogle has become synonymous with search,鈥� Sherman says. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 Microsoft鈥檚 biggest challenge.鈥�